


The Last Ice Age

by fourteenlines



Category: Farscape
Genre: Apocalypse, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:07:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22253152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourteenlines/pseuds/fourteenlines
Summary: In my story "A Whiter Shade," John dreams about the end of the world. He dreams that Earth's sun ispeeled layer from layer by a dozen wormholes, swallowing steel mammoths in the expanding Scarran-Sebacean war... [T]he planets spiral slowly outward. Earth...turns cold and brittle, freezes once and for all time. The last Ice Age.This is that story.





	The Last Ice Age

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A Whiter Shade](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12451) by [fourteenlines](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourteenlines/pseuds/fourteenlines). 



> Originally posted circa 2004 for Farscape Friday.

The idea of heat seems like something impossibly far-off, like something she knows only from a dream. But her memory is not failing her yet. She still remembers, however dimly, that she once lived in a legendary country called Florida, where people used phrases like "one hundred degrees in the shade."

She can recall summers from her childhood, her skin flushed and sheened with sweat. Her mother sat her down in front of the television, put *Dr. Zhivago* in the tape player, and told her to "think cold." This was once all she knew of great stalactites made of ice, of frost-encrusted clothing, of a world silent and white.

These things surround her now. Whenever she ventures toward the surface, the echoes of her own footsteps ring loudly in her ears. The silence is perhaps worse than the cold. The cold is all she knows anymore. Her joints do not remember heat, her skin does not remember the sun's caress. But the earth went silent after a sudden terrifying flash of light, and that is what signals to her mind that this world is dying.

The light was most likely the final exit of their heavenly visitors. Man had feared the presence of extraterrestrials for decades, and had yearned for their greetings for just as long. Some had thought they would be friendly, others had thought they would kill indiscriminately and enslave nations.

No one thought Earth, and the humans on it, would be as inconsequential as flies to their alien visitors.

She had looked through the big telescope at the university observatory herself when the ships appeared out of nowhere. Soon, the night sky had become bright with flashes of solar energy and the weird blue light of wormholes as close as the moon.

It was the same kind of phenomena that had swallowed John down its gaping maw. Jonah and the whale. Or maybe that should be Ahab.

The twin-engine plane used to be a Cessna, but its repairs have been cobbled together out of so many types of parts it can't be given a proper name anymore. Even here, in the cavern where it is not exposed to the wind and the other elements, she has to de-ice the propellers and the doors. The gas lines are all frozen, so she has Djembe help her light a small fire to warm the makeshift hangar.

This had been Dad's plane. When he'd left that last time, he'd entrusted it to her. She had sat, shivering, across the water from Mission Control and watched the rocket lift off. It was the most hopeless endeavor mankind could contemplate. They would not even make it to Mars before they ran out of food or fuel or air, and Mars was in as much trouble as Earth. The whole solar system was spiralling out toward open space.

Afterward, she had walked toward the launch site, across the gulf on the thick sheet of ice it had become. The sun's wan remaining light had guided her. The bright afterburn of rocket fuel danced, even now, in front of her closed eyes.

The plane finally shudders to life, and Olivia puts on her shearling cap and her leather gloves. Dad taught her to fly, and even in these conditions she will not fail. Djembe climbs in behind her, and when they are clear of the cave they take flight.

She has to fly low over the rolling hills of this once-forested land. The atmosphere has held thus far, but at any kind of altitude the temperatures quickly approach the frigidity of space.

She is making a gentle swoop over the coastline when Djembe lays a hand on her shoulder. "There." He points to an unmoving outcropping of bare rock.

Olivia frowns and makes a low pass. He's right. It's not bare rock. They are seal corpses.

She has to bring the plane down a quarter-mile away. By the time they reach their bounty her lips have turned blue.

The corpses are nearly frozen solid but that only means the meat will not be rancid. If it were rancid, they would eat it anyway, but it's nice to have the taste of something other than death in their mouths, for a change.

+++

They sit huddled around the dying embers of the cooking fire, letting seal fat digest in their bellies and willing their eyes to adjust to the gathering dark. The fire is not for warmth. They have geothermal energy for that; have it in spades. It is the only thing they seem to have plenty of anymore.

Light is the precious commodity here, deep within the cavern where it's safe to sleep without the worry of frostbite. Fuel has to be conserved, if only because they still hold to the practice of cooking their meat before they eat it. No doubt before this is all over, they will be reduced to tearing raw flesh with their teeth, but they cling to civilization however they can.

Earlier, sweeping the area for food, Olivia had spotted an ugly brown scar on the white horizon. Trees, in all likelihood; a place in this godforsaken former rainforest that hadn't been clearcut entirely. If they had fuel enough for the plane, she would lead an expedition to the edge of the world, and the halls of their cavern would burn bright against the oncoming night. They would have a festival. They would celebrate the last solstice of the world with fire, dancing, roasted meat, wine.

But fuel for the plane is the most precious commodity of all, and Olivia finds she is not quite ready to give up. Not quite ready to waste all their gas on a premature wake for humanity, not when that gas means food in their bellies and life in their veins.

She huddles closer to Djembe, and rests her chapped face on his shoulder.

He is truly a marvel. He had endured the great famines of the African continent and travelled here because he'd heard, as everyone else, that people were surviving in Central America.

Olivia still does not know what drew her here, after the Northern Freeze. She supposes it is because there was nothing else to do, not after nearly everything and everyone above the 47th parallel had frozen so quickly there was no way to get them out. The Northern Hemisphere had the rotten luck to be in winter when it happened, when that last layer of hydrogen gasses had been ripped from the sun by a great sucking wormhole, and the fate of Earth had been written in stone. Dad had left already, off into the wild blue yonder like a true Air Force colonel.

Susan and Frank had been stationed in Alaska at the time.

Djembe had lost his family as well, or so she assumed. Fran liked to gossip that he'd had a wife and seven children in Cote d'Ivoire, but he never spoke of his former life.

Some of them were like that. Others spoke constantly of their families, their pets, their former homes. Things they missed like barbecues and Sundays in the park, like hot noodles and sake, or soccer games watched in the blistering sun, surrounded by a stadium of screaming fellow fans.

Olivia supposes she is among the former group, though it's not that she doesn't think constantly of what she has lost. It's more a matter of not trusting the accuracy of the things she can still call to mind.

Djembe wraps an arm around her. The last embers of the fire are giving off their orange light. The sounds of other voices echo in other chambers of the cavern, but they are mostly in shadow.

As their fire dies as well, Olivia speaks into the dark.

"How long do you think we can survive this way?" She knows he will take her meaning for what it really is. She's no physicist; she cannot calculate how long before Earth will be completely inhospitable to human life. Perhaps John would have known.

Djembe sighs. "Years, perhaps? It could be decades. People could go on like this for hundreds of years, I suppose, burrowing farther and farther into the ground and getting more and more desperate for food."

"Or it could be tomorrow. We might never wake up."

"There is always that possibility. Even before this happened."

Olivia thinks of John. Of how he wouldn't allow himself to believe he wouldn't come back from his test-run. She thinks of Susan and Frank and Bobby, frozen in their beds.

She thinks of Mom, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, long years past.

She takes Djembe's hand in the dark.

The others might be irrevocably gone, but she is yet living.


End file.
